Winner of the Paddy Power Political Novel of the YearIn 1998 the
gilt is starting to come off a new era.Mark Lucas, the recently
appointed foreign minister, is in a dilemma. A disk containing the
names of British informants to the Stasi has ended up in the hands
of the government. Elected on a platform of transparency, he faces
resistance from the diplomatic service who don't want him to return
it to the Germans, despite their entreaties.Alex Rutherford, a
young man working for the intelligence services, wakes up one
morning with a hangover and a dawning realisation that his computer
is lost and, with it, the only copy of that disk.When the disk is
delivered to the newspaper where journalist Anna Travers works, she
finds herself unravelling not just a mystery, but many people's
lives ...Acts of Omission plunges the reader into a virtuoso
recreation of late-nineties Britain. Suspenseful, exquisitely
constructed and thought-provokingly topical, it is a novel about
what happens when state secrets become public, and the human cost
of those secrets.